Computer and communication technologies continue to advance at a rapid pace. Indeed, computer and communication technologies are involved in many aspects of a person's day. For example, many devices being used today by consumers have a small computer incorporated within the device. These small computers come in varying sizes and degrees of sophistication. These small computers may vary in sophistication from one microcontroller to a fully-functional complete computer system. For example, small computers may be a one-chip computer, such as a microcontroller, a one-board type of computer, such as a controller, or a typical desktop computer, such as an IBM-PC compatible, etc.
Printers are used with computers to print various kinds of items including letters, documents, pictures, etc. Many different kinds of printers are commercially available. Ink jet printers and laser printers are fairly common among computer users. Ink jet printers propel droplets of ink directly onto the paper. Laser printers use a laser beam to print.
Printers are a type of imaging device. Imaging devices include, but are not limited to, physical printers, multi-functional peripherals, a printer pool, a printer cluster, a fax machine, a plotter, a scanner, a logical device, an electronic whiteboard, a tablet PC, a computer monitor, a file, etc.
Different kinds of computer software facilitate the use of imaging devices. The computer or computing device that will be used to print the materials typically has one or more pieces of software running on the computer that enable it to send the necessary information to the printer to enable printing of the materials. If the computer or computing device is on a computer network there may be one or more pieces of software running on one or more computers on the computer network that facilitate printing.
In imaging devices a user can typically perform a variety of imaging functions from various inputs to various outputs. Some of these functions, such as print and copy, allow the user to frame the output as a document. That is, the user is able to specify document formatting options either from the front panel or from a user interface on a host. Some possible document formatting options include such options as paper size, placement of pages, scale, orientation and pagination.
When an image is scanned the imaging device produces image data. Many graphics files are image data files. With image data there is no inherent concept of a document. Instead, the image data is an unframed image of arbitrary size based on an application viewer's interpretation of the images size (e.g., horizontal and vertical sizes) and resolution. Therefore, the viewer makes arbitrary decisions on how the images are viewed, such as scale and placement.
In certain computing environments, it would be desirable for a user to document frame an image output from an imaging device. Benefits may be realized by providing improved systems and methods for document framing imaging date.